As a feminist Democrat, women’s access to legal abortion is important to me.

But it increasingly feels as if my party’s leaders think they can coast as champions of women’s rights on that one issue alone, even while unraveling many of our other protections and summarily dismissing any women who object as “right wing.”

One example is the Biden administration’s current plan to rewrite Title IX, the landmark 1972 legislation which has allowed many thousands of girls to participate in school and college sports, to include “gender identity.” If successful, the same law that once empowered young female athletes will be used to deny them a fair chance.

The women who fought to enact Title IX 50 years ago surely never anticipated anyone arguing that despite every speed and strength record in history being held by a male athlete, women and girls are at no disadvantage competing against someone born into a male body once that person says they identify as female.

Despite the Department of Education’s claim that they’ll consider sports as a separate issue, experts say that Title IX labeling it “discrimination” for schools not to respect declared gender identities means girls’ sport teams will be obligated to include anyone who identifies as female.

Multiple studies have now shown that the many athletic advantages conferred by male puberty can’t be reversed by cross-sex hormones, yet women and girls are denounced as hateful bigots for objecting to the inevitable loss of team places, opportunities and wins whenever a biological male demands to compete as one of them.

The Title IX changes don’t just affect sports, either. They would codify into federal law that schoolgirls must share spaces like bathrooms and school locker rooms with students who identify as female, regardless of anatomy. Girls would just have to deal with feeling violated when told they must undress for gym beside male bodies, because validating the feelings of those bodies’ owners is more important than their right to body privacy and dignity. What a dangerous lesson to teach our daughters.

How did we get to the point where simply acknowledging the reality of biological sex is deemed hate? Everyone deserves protection from discrimination in employment, education and housing, but does being inclusive have to preclude common sense? It’s ludicrous to believe that the moment a male declares he feels female, there’s no physical difference between him and me or your mother.

Whether we like it or not, there is a conflict between women’s right to our own sports and spaces and those who say we must accept everyone’s professed “gender identity” on demand. The dogma of inclusion has overtaken long-established women’s protections at breathtaking speed.

Worst of all has been watching the public bullying of women who try to defend their own rights. Women in Los Angeles were falsely branded right-wing liars staging an anti-trans hoax and blamed for causing violence against trans people after they objected when a serial sex offender who said he identified as a woman stripped nude in front of them and their (also-undressed) little girls in the female-only section of Wi Spa last year. By the time police charged Darren Merager with indecent exposure in the incident, it hardly mattered; women had been soundly punished for saying “no,” and others would surely know better than to do so again.

Just last month, an abusive mob in Port Townsend, Washington, screamed down 80-year-old Julie Jaman and tore down her supporters’ suffragist flags as Jaman tried to speak about being banned from the city YMCA, where she has swum for 35 years, for objecting to an employee who had only recently begun identifying as female supervising as little girls removed their swimsuits in the women’s locker room. Democratic Mayor David Faber applauded the mob, labeling Jaman’s left-wing feminist supporters “moral-panic-stricken right-wing nutjobs.”

Nearly every woman I’ve spoken to about this, young and old, says she wants to retain our single-sex spaces and sports, but most fear facing abuse if they speak out. Still, I can’t be the only one debating whether I can continue voting for a party that won’t support all of my rights.

Yes, I want legal abortion, but I also want safety for women in prison and female-only locker rooms and fair sports for female athletes, and I don’t want to be forced to choose which women’s rights I’m willing to sacrifice at the ballot box.

Jennifer Gingrich of Portland is a lifelong feminist and signatory to the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights.

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